Five free checks catch most rug pulls before the first buy: can you sell it, is the liquidity locked, what can the owner still do, who holds the supply and who launched it.
Most rug pulls can be caught in ten minutes, before the first buy, with free tools and no coding. Robert Stone, editor of DeFi Market Journal, put the checks on one page for the publication's readers. Here they are in plain English.
First, get the right address. Copy the contract address from the project's own website or its CoinGecko page, never from a Telegram message. Scammers launch copies with the same name and ticker.
Check one. Can you sell it? Paste the address into a honeypot checker such as Honeypot dot is. It simulates a buy and a sell and shows the tax on each. Walk away if the sell fails or the tax is ten percent or more, because some owners can raise it to one hundred percent later.
Check two. Is the liquidity locked? Whoever adds the trading pool gets LP tokens, a receipt that lets them take the money back out. On DEX Screener, look for LP tokens that are burned or locked, and read the unlock date. A two-week lock protects you for two weeks.
Check three. What can the owner still do? Open the contract on Etherscan, BscScan or Solscan. Walk away if the code is unverified, or if the owner can still mint tokens, blacklist wallets, pause trading or change the tax. On Solana, the mint and freeze authorities should both be revoked.
Check four. Who holds the supply? Open the Holders tab. Set aside the burn address, the exchange pool and any locker, then look at the biggest real wallets. Walk away if the top ten hold about a fifth or more, or if a cluster of wallets was funded from one source in the same hour.
Check five. Who launched it? Click through to the deployer, the wallet that created the contract, and see what else it has launched. Walk away if it has dead tokens behind it, or if it was funded through a mixer just before launch.
One failed check is enough. There will be another token tomorrow. If you don't have time to run the checks, you don't have time to buy.
The full guide, How to Spot a Rug Pull Before You Buy, is on DeFi Market Journal at defimarketjournal dot com. The printable one-page checklist comes free with the Sunday Briefing, a plain-English email that lands every Sunday at 8 a.m. Eastern with the week's new guides and what happened in the markets. No price calls, one email a week, and you can unsubscribe any time.
This is information, not financial advice. No check or scanner can rule out a loss. DeFi Market Journal City: Belen Address: 400 N Main St Website: https://defimarketjournal.com Email: news@defimarketjournal.com